Transportation is a critical part of the entire global economy. However, current ground transportation requires negotiation of significant natural and man-made obstacles occurring along the ground surface in order to transit from a specific source to a specific destination. This requires the creation and maintenance of expansive physical ground infrastructures, including roads, bridges, interchanges, waterways, ports, and a number of other pathways and structures, each having high economic, social and environmental implications.
Although an extensive number of concepts have proposed unique vehicles, from Harry Pettit's 1908 drawing “King's Dream of New York” (See for example, http://www.skyscraper.org/EXHIBITIONS/FUTURE_CITY/NEW_YORK_MODERN/w alkthrough—1900.php) to the many iterations of the flying car, or enormous megastructures to address the global need to realize cargo transportation both at the high-speed, long-distance level and the low-speed, localized level, none take advantage of the buoyancy and wind speed that provide constant lift to balloon and kite systems in the atmosphere to statically support the mechanics of a cabled aerial transportation system, in the same manner as does the technology described herein.
In U.S. Pat. No. 6,494,143 on the movement of vehicles, Dr. Alexander Bolonkin discloses an atmospherically-suspended conveyance cable design kept in relatively stationary position that can be combined together to form interconnected conveyance cable networks for long-distance transportation with various destination ports. Because Bolokin's concept is for high-speed, large-scale applications only, the design requires at least a large portion of the lift and stability over the system to come from the flight vehicles themselves, which have complexity nearing current aircraft designs, and require runway infrastructures for takeoff and landing. This design lacks the capacity for the modularity and scalability that allows for lower-speed, more localized cargo transfer because of the specified requirements for independent flight vehicles accelerated by separate ground-based acceleration devices, where the accelerated flight vehicles then attach to an atmospherically-suspended conveyance cable by a single separate vehicle cable.
Balloon logging systems, employing ground-winched cables to haul a balloon and the load carried beneath it to move cargo from point to point, have been in use around the world since the 1950's. However, none of these systems deals with more than one movement of cargo at a time, or has designs with conveyance cable-type cargo transit for lower cycle times and higher volumes. One balloon logging concept, studied and successfully prototyped by several graduate students at Oregon State University (OSU) in 1984, calls for a single-load, semi-stationary design. This design was based off of Mr. John Bell's patent (U.S. Pat. No. 3,807,577) on aerial load lifting, which disclosed a semi-stationary atmospherically-suspended haulback cable system designed to transport one load at a time with a ground-attached loop and a single pendulum line extending from the apex of the semi-stationary structure to support a majority of the load's weight. The design creates essentially the opposite of Bolonkin's problem by focusing on low-speed, localized cargo transfer without consideration for high-speed, long-distance cargo transport over multiple interconnected systems, and has specific system requirements for a ground-mounted haulback cable cargo handling system, a single pendulum line, balloon suspension, and a central power source that is limited to ground stations.
Advanced traction kite systems have recently been commercialized to aid in a number of heavy industry applications including ship propulsion, but even if they have been scaled for designs dragging loads on the scale of hundreds of tons, they have not been used as stationary platforms to suspend cabled cargo transportation. High-tech adaptive flight control systems have allowed robotic systems, like the aforementioned traction kite systems and other automated parafoil systems, to realize significantly stable platforms. However, these systems have not been used as atmospherically-suspended, semi-stationary platforms for cabled cargo transportation.
Multi-axial, flexible-cable, robotic systems, such as the NIST Robocrane and advanced camera systems, such as the CableCam and SkyCam, have demonstrated the cargo handling capabilities of cabled robotics in three-dimensional space. In related industries, a number of other complex cargo handling capabilities, like those used in automated storage and retrieval systems (AS/RS) in material handling facilities, have shown that the applications of such systems are useful, extensive, and diverse. But even if these systems extensively demonstrate the usefulness of complex cargo transportation, none of them have been used in conjunction with stationary atmospherically-suspended platforms.
Related patents known in the art include the following. U.S. Pat. No. 6,809,495, issued to Rodnunsky on Oct. 26, 2004, discloses a system and method for moving objects within three dimensional space. U.S. Pat. No. 7,207,277, issued to Rodnunsky on Apr. 24, 2007, discloses a system and method for moving objects within two-dimensional space. U.S. Pat. No. 3,807,577, issued to Bell on Apr. 30, 1974, discloses an aerial load lifting and transporting method and system. U.S. Pat. No. 6,494,143, issued to Bolonkin on Dec. 17, 2002, discloses a system and method for the movement of vehicles. U.S. Pat. No. 7,046,934, issued to Badesha et al. on May 16, 2006, discloses an optical communication system using a high altitude tethered balloon. U.S. Pat. No. 5,080,302, issued to Hoke on Jan. 14, 1992, discloses a method and apparatus for aerially transporting loads. U.S. Pat. No. 6,978,720, issued to Johnson on Dec. 27, 2005, discloses a gondola railcar construction. U.S. Pat. No. 7,183,663, issued to Roberts et al. on Feb. 27, 2007, discloses precisely controlled flying electric generators.
Related non-patent literature known in the art includes the following. In “Steady-State Analysis of the Multi-Tethered Aerostat Platform for the Large Adaptive Reflector Telescope” available online at archive of www.drao.nrc.ca/science/ska/other_formats/munich_joeleff_w_pageno.pdf, Fitzsimmons, Veidt, and Dewdney disclose the use of a multi-tethered aerostat platform in a particular application for a telescope.
The foregoing patent and other information reflect the state of the art of which the inventor is aware and are tendered with a view toward discharging the inventor's acknowledged duty of candor in disclosing information that may be pertinent to the patentability of the technology described herein. It is respectfully stipulated, however, that the foregoing patent and other information do not teach or render obvious, singly or when considered in combination, the inventor's claimed invention.